By Blood A Novel

41.


Once the sound of the cab faded off, I could hear music spilling out of a doorway. The night had turned cold and blustery, and as I crossed the crowded parking lot, the music came and went, blown about by the wind.

In the entranceway was a woman sitting on a barstool, who stood at my approach.

You lost, buddy? she asked.

She was an average-looking woman with a pleasant face, wearing a white shirt and chinos, with a parka around her shoulders—nothing to identify her as a lesbian, to my eye. Her manner was not exactly hostile, but she was wary and a little amused, I thought.

A friend asked me to meet her here, I said.

Another woman came to join her. She looked precisely like my idea of a lesbian: big, heavyset, mannish. The words “bull dyke” came to mind involuntarily. What’s he doing here? she said to the first woman.

Says he’s meeting a friend.

They both laughed, looked me up and down, and finally the first woman sighed and turned to me. Too bad we can’t keep you out legally, she said. Cover’s five bucks, Mr. Friend of Somebody.

I gave her the money, and she stamped my hand with something out of a children’s printing set: the image of a giraffe. Then I was free to enter, but as I went by, the big woman pulled me aside and said, Be good, little buddy. I’m keeping my eye on you.

I found myself in a large, darkened room, standing before a crowded dance floor. A revolving mirrored ball hung from the ceiling, casting circling pinpoints of light on the dancers, as they too swirled about, so that for a moment I felt dizzy, as if it were the floor that was moving, not the ball or the dancers. The room was hot and smoky, throbbing with the beat of music I knew was called disco. And as my eyes became accustomed to the dim light, I could see that the dance floor was ringed with small tables, each one filled with a small group of women who crowded around the tiny circle of the table, holding cocktail glasses and bottles of beer. So many women! I thought, for there were perhaps two hundred or more in the room, filling not only the dance floor and the tables but also the bar area behind me, where ladies stood four deep as they pressed forward to place an order with the busy women bartenders.

And all of them are lesbians! came my next thought. For there were charming ladies of every variety, far outnumbering the “bull dykes” whom I had always imagined were the typical sort. There were women in neat pantsuits—businesswomen, they seemed. And many “old-style girls,” who looked just as delectable as the patient had said, in their tight sweaters and red lips, curvy, like lounge vamps of the fifties. There were tiny Asian women, who seemed to be in pairs in which one partner took the role of the man and one the woman. And women who simply looked fresh and athletic, as if they had just come from the clubhouse after a swim—could these be “Dinah Shore lesbians”?

By far the largest group were the “politicos”: women with short hair and flannel shirts who, to my mind, looked not like women but like tender preadolescents. Many had stripped off their shirts and danced in their undershirts, cotton muscle shirts, braless nipples bobbing sweetly beneath the surface of the cloth. The word “youths” came to mind as I gazed upon them—not “boys” or “girls” but “youths”—for they seemed to have stopped themselves at that delicate moment just before the terrible descent into the divide between male and female: girls who could still run around unashamed in their underwear, boys whose cheeks were still soft with down. And as I watched the couples sway on the dance floor—to a popular slow song, “Midnight Train to Georgia”—I could not understand why the patient was so resistant to their charms. For I found them adorably sexy, with their short haircuts with cut-in sideburns and cute little cowlicks, their tight blue jeans, bodies pressed tightly together as they moved to the rhythm of that aching, plaintive song. And, thrust between each other’s legs, a knee seeking a tender spot.

Was Charlotte here? I suddenly wondered. She might be relaxing amongst her goat-lady lesbians. Then again, about to find herself newly single, she might be one of those women in blue jeans, her knee already exploring the inner thigh of someone new. And which of these women had the patient flirted with, on those nights when she had had one too many: that woman wearing a dark, tailored pantsuit? Or, better yet, that one there: a blowzy vamp showing cleavage? It thrilled me to think that this is where the patient had stood, right on the edge of this dance floor, gazing into the many faces of female allure.

The room suddenly seemed very crowded, for all at once there was a cloud of women around me. Their bodies were so close that I could smell their perfumes and hair gels and sweat, and I did not try to move away, for I confess it was a very pleasant sensation: to be so surrounded by so much female flesh, the occasional brush of a breast against my arm, the rub of a backside, a hip to my thigh. Without actually dancing (which would have been strange, since I was alone), I tried to sway with the crowd, just slightly, if only to go unopposed with the movement all around me. I felt myself being drawn from the margin of the dance floor slowly toward the center, and again I let myself be taken by the overall drift, for it seemed odder to force my way out than to let the situation be as it was: twirling lights, undulating women’s bodies, a high, sweet voice singing I love to love you, baby.

Then the music changed to something faster, and a cry of happiness rose from the throats of the women all around me. They danced with a wilder energy, throwing their arms about, singing along with the chorus. Voulez-vous couchez avec moi, ce soir? In the tighter press of bodies, I began to be elbowed now and again, but I thought nothing of it, as there was now a kind of abandon in the dancing, a joyousness, and I—a man amidst this happy throng of women—was surely an obstacle to their pleasures.

I tried to edge my way off the dance floor. But the crowd was now quite thick, and I had not gone two steps when I was sharply jostled. Sorry, said a woman, giving me a tight smile. She was a politico type, and after I mumbled a “sorry” of my own, it seemed to me that her girlfriend, another woman in an undershirt, threw her partner directly against me. They both laughed, then danced away; and before I could consider what had just happened, I felt an elbow to my ribs. Instinctively stepping aside, I received a jab in my back. I twisted around, and an arm flew into my neck. Oops! came a voice behind me. I tried to see where this had come from, but suddenly a foot came down upon mine: the high-heeled shoe of a blonde in a tight skirt. Sorry! she sing-songed as her partner swept her away.

The women seemed to be pressing in around me. The dance floor cannot really be as crowded as all this, I thought, as I was bumped from one side, then from the other. I tried to move away, to an area that might be more open, but I was soon stepped on again, by a businesswoman in sensible pumps, then by the combat boots of a bull dyke. A tiny Asian woman, giggling, reached out a graceful foot and pressed it upon my toes, then howled with delight, like a child at a balloon dance.

And still the women seemed to press in, to the point where I could not move, even to defend myself from the next spike heel to the instep, the flung arm that hit me in the face, the fist that landed on my throat. The heat became overwhelming. The smell of their bodies and lotions was now sickening. The feel of their bodies upon mine—the tight jam of flesh on flesh—was now causing me a kind of panic, as I was terrified that I might unintentionally touch a breast or a thigh and so bring upon myself some sort of physical retribution. I wanted desperately to leave, but no matter how I turned and turned, the women’s bodies trapped me in place, and I seemed to drift ever farther from the edge of the dance floor, from the entrance, from the red glow of the exit sign, which I watched recede into the distance as I was swept into the depths of the room. Still the music throbbed and the lights swirled and the blows fell upon me, and I could not find my way out of this mass of women, who, I saw, were laughing at me.

I was about to cry out, when a loud voice shouted from the far side of the room:

Take it easy, girls. Don’t gangbang ’im!

All the women stepped back, just an inch, and I was able to turn around and see where this voice was coming from. It was the bull dyke from the door, parting the crowd with her arms. She was laughing. Don’t gangbang ’im, girls, she kept repeating, and soon the crowd took up her laughter in a rippling wave that washed over the dance floor. Is that what they had been doing: gangbanging me? Finally the big woman reached me and put a meaty hand on my arm.

You better get outta here, mister, she said, still laughing, before these girls stomp you to death.

I moved in her wake toward the door. But still the women were gathered around me like clinging fog. Creep! someone said in my right ear. I turned in the direction of the voice, and immediately to my left someone said, Letch! I turned my head again, and directly into my face a woman spat, Pervert!

Go on, mister, said my rescuer. Just keep moving.

At the doorway, she raised an eyebrow at me, which was pierced by a tiny ring. And remember, little buddy, she said in a kindly voice, it’ll be worse next time.

I hurried across the parking lot, shivering as my sweat met the cold night air.

I marched down the short street to the dark boulevard, then stopped, searching for evidence of the elevated roadway, for any sign of the route that cab had taken. I walked in one direction then another, striding, the taunts of the women sounding in my head. Creep. Letch. Pervert. That’s what the students at the university had called me. But it was all wrong, very wrong. I always went alone to student haunts. I never approached—never even thought of touching anyone. The boy intrigued me, that was all. It was only my way of trying to understand him!

Somehow I came to the elevated roadway. Somehow I found the route the cab had taken, Folsom Street, I thought. Not a block from the roadway was the neon sign of what seemed to be a diner. Hamburger Mary’s, it said. I opened the door to a rush of warm air.

Table? asked a waitress.

I slid gratefully into a booth, took a menu, asked for coffee. As I sat and felt the blood coming back into my hands, I noticed there were many men in leather jackets in the diner, some with chains on their wrists and around their necks. After the waitress brought my coffee and took my order, I asked her, Is this some sort of biker hangout?

She laughed, a hoarse laugh. You don’t know where the hell you are, do you, honey?

I ate a hamburger, fried potatoes, a salad, finding myself starved despite my dinner earlier in the evening. Feeling warmed and fortified, I asked for the check, paid it, and prepared to go back out into the night to find my way home. It was only when the waitress brought my change that I noticed it: her height, the size of her hands, the Adam’s apple that bobbed at her throat.

She must have seen the look in my eyes, for she said, Honey, you don’t look so good. Let me call you a cab.

Then she shrieked: You’re a cab! You’re a cab!

Her laugh was so shrill that I instinctively slid to the far side of the booth. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the other patrons, the men in leather and chains, were glancing over, amused, but otherwise showed no interest. Was this a common occurrence? Could anyone wander in from the street for a hamburger and find himself pressed against the wall while a looming man-woman shrieked at him in utter ridicule?

Please, I said. I’ll just—

Oh, don’t be so sensitive! She had abruptly stopped laughing. I’ll let you know when your cab’s here. Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to happen to you.





42.


I could not bring myself to go home. Not knowing where else to go, I asked the taxi driver to take me to the Palace. The hotel must have a bar, I thought, where I could prepare myself for the long ride out to Ocean Beach. But in the lounge I found only two drunken men accompanied by three prostitutes. Stretching out behind them, all across the back bar, was a large, garish mural painted by Maxfield Parrish: the Pied Piper leading children up a rocky promontory. There was something grotesque in this larger-than-life-size Piper with his hooked nose, the children’s phony, chub-cheeked innocence, the impossibly purple sunset behind them; the live prostitutes painted almost as shamelessly as the mural. I fled the bar, crossed the street, stepped over the desperate men sprawled in the doorway, and rode the elevator up to my office.

There I lay in the dark, trying to make myself comfortable on the small settee. The Palace’s rooftop pink-neon sign, three stories high, loomed over the window. The first letter A was defective, and I watched the restless oscillation of Palace, P lace, Palace, P lace, as I tried to empty my mind of the evening’s events.

I must have dozed off, for the next thing I knew, I was being startled awake by a thundering slam. It took me a moment to realize it was a door closing. Then, hearing footfalls on the other side of the wall, I knew the slam must have come from the door to the next room—Dr. Schussler’s office!

What would Dr. Schussler be doing at her office late at night on the Friday before Christmas? It must be a special cleaning crew, I thought. But I heard no vacuum, no sound of a trash cart being wheeled along the corridor. There were only the continuing footfalls, and then the thud of something heavy, perhaps a briefcase, landing on a surface—Dr. Schussler’s desk, judging by the direction from which the sound had come.

Gott! came in a huge sigh, as the analyst (for now I knew it could only be she) threw herself into her chair much as she had thrown down her briefcase.

I dared not move. The settee upon which I lay was old, poorly built, given to creaks and moans. I was aware of the quiet in the street below, the absence of the Palace doorman’s taxi whistle, which earlier had repeatedly pierced the night; of the silence in the building but for a hum I had never heard before, a strange, high whine that seemed to emanate from the building’s very core.

Above all I was aware of Dr. Schussler’s stillness. She had not taken off her coat, and I could clearly imagine her sitting in her chair, still bundled against the chill night, her head against the neck rest. Her weariness was palpable through the wall. I suddenly saw us as if from above, Dora and I on either side of our thin common door, neither of us here for happy reasons, the Palace sign flickering over us—Palace, P lace, Palace, P lace—our common bath of light, the unreliable hopefulness of its pink-neon glow.

I wanted the moment to stretch on and on; I thought I could remain immobile for hours, if only Dr. Schussler would do the same. But my hope was dashed when the doctor abruptly stood, removed her outer garments, and hung them on a rattling rack on the back of her door. After bustling about briefly, she sat down.

There came clicking sounds I could not identify, then a whir, then another click, after which the doctor said, Testing, one, two, one, two. There were further whirs and clicks, then the repetition of Testing, one, two, one, two—and I understood that Dr. Schussler was speaking into a tape recorder.

Friday night, she began, December 20th, one a.m. Then she laughed. Saturday morning, she began again, December 21st, one a.m. Journal of work with patients previously coded as one and two. Journal of consultations with Dr. Gurevitch concerning the patient coded as three.

She clicked off the machine.

I could barely constrain my body. Patient three! This Gurevitch was the doctor she had turned to for “consultation”! For I instantly remembered the urgent calls, always about a “patient three,” always after difficult sessions with the patient—our patient, my patient. To whom else could Dora Schussler be referring? Patient three! I had to still myself in that creaking settee; had to calm my heart; had to ignore the electric adrenaline that shocked me as if I were a dead frog galvanized into twitching on the dissection table. I heard the scrape of Dr. Schussler’s match; smelled the burnt phosphorus, then the tease of smoke from her Viceroy. She exhaled: a breath of exquisite slowness and depth. I had to, had to, had to constrain myself! She inhaled and exhaled again, then again, and yet a third time.

A clack: At last Dr. Schussler switched on the tape recorder. She cleared her throat then said into the machine:

Patient one remains cathectic upon his former wife, V.

The therapist went on speaking, but I had the sense that I had suddenly lost the ability to understand English. It seemed that V had a new husband, E, and there was a teenage son of someone called B, whose boss, W—no, that couldn’t be right. W must be the boss of patient one. There were several cathexi, and characters named E, V, M, and W. If my patient’s life had once seemed a story begun at random, this journal entry was nothing more than a scattering of Scrabble tiles. And its very incomprehensibleness seemed hostile to me, a narrative that refused to engage me—refused to distract me from my lone and sharp desire: Patient three; tell me about patient three!

Time wore on. I was cold. My coat, which I had thrown over myself as a blanket, was not sufficient to ward off the chill of the unheated office. The night seemed too still, as if no one existed but Dr. Schussler and I, and the doctor were speaking of the vanished. Patient two. A young man who could not separate from his mother. His “childhood fixations” and “transitional objects” and “organizations of reality”—I hated them, hated him, hated that he had been coded as “two,” which ordinally stood between me and the object of my desire: “three.”

Dr. Schussler had not turned on the light. She had barely moved. She was smoking constantly, one cigarette lit from another—no further scent of phosphorus had slid under our common door. And yet again I asked myself, Who was this Dora Schussler, this analyst in consultation with another analyst; this woman sitting beside me smoking in the gloom, in whose hands lay the patient’s fate?

She stopped speaking of patient two. Moments passed in which nothing happened. Then:

Note to transcriber, she said at last. Close now personal journal. Please to add the following to the journal of consultations concerning the patient formerly coded as three.

Patient three!

As we discussed, Dr. Gurevitch, said the therapist with a sigh, I continue in the analysis of this uncontrolled countertransference. I am taking careful notes in an attempt to make conscious to myself the areas in which I am overidentifying with the patient, and the effects of that overidentification.

However, she continued after a coughing spell—her deep sigh had disturbed her smoker’s inland sea of phlegm, which roiled while the doctor struggled to calm it. However, Dr. Gurevitch, despite our work, I am not certain if the client’s analysis is proceeding toward a successful outcome. I continue to feel that the damage is grave. I cannot undo my conviction that I have done irreparable harm to patient three.





43.


Irreparable harm! I wanted to shout. What harm? What! How dare you do irreparable harm to my beloved patient! I wanted to leap up and pound on the doctor’s door. Yet I was powerless. What good would it do to intervene now? The patient would not be served if I broke into Dr. Schussler’s office and dragged the woman away.

So I remained still, cold on the settee, suppressing my breathing. The tape recorder ran on in a low whine. The doctor switched off the machine. She sighed as one in grief. Then:

Clack. The machine came on again.

Yes, I know, Dr. Gurevitch, the therapist continued. I know. My guilt is part of the countertransference. Yet, as we are telling our patients always, understanding a feeling is no protection against actually feeling it.

To summarize, she continued after another long sigh, I have come to concurrence with the idea that it was not inappropriate for me to encourage the patient to explore the fact of her adoption, specifically exploring her feelings of not belonging in her family. Unconfronted, this has led her into a neurotic pattern of letting herself be chosen by inappropriate partners, since the feeling of “wrongness of match” is what she associates with love, is what is “familiar” to her.

There is some disagreement as to whether or not her lesbianism is part of this neurosis, said the therapist. The DSM has not yet specifically addressed female-to-female relationships—the recent delisting of homosexuality as an illness relates most directly to male homosexual relationships. Yet you and I agree, Dr. Gurevitch, that patient three’s sexual love for women is not necessarily part of her internal organization regarding inappropriate partners. The specific choice of a woman partner is what is at issue here, not the choice of a woman in principle. I will therefore continue to treat the breakup with her most recent girlfriend as an opportunity for the patient to examine her affective choices in the context of her larger psychological issues.

(“Opportunity!” I thought. Her grief over this breakup is not an “opportunity,” you damned therapist!)

You have helped me to understand, Dr. Gurevitch (the doctor went on as I calmed myself), that it was not necessarily an error to confront the patient with her continual evasions concerning her adopted status. Where I erred was doing so before I had prepared the psychic groundwork. I continued to believe that her resistance, her refusal to discuss the fact of her adoption—her habitual protection of her adoptive parents, another set of inappropriate partners, so to speak—was part of the neurotic pattern. My unconscious motive in doing so, as we discussed, was my wish that she would enact my deepest desire: to escape the sins of my Nazi bastard father.

This last statement was said with such venom that it seemed not to have come from the woman who had been speaking with such assurance in the cold argot of psychotherapy. Dr. Schussler slammed off the recorder, stood, then paced about her office. She continued to smoke, and again I saw her as if from above, the doctor circling, a trail of smoke glowing pink in the nervous light of the hotel sign.

Then she abruptly stopped and turned on the tape recorder.

Note to transcriber, she said. Delete the sentence containing the phrase “Nazi bastard.” Then: No. Keep it. STET, I believe you say. Keep it. Ja. Keep.

The doctor took a long drag on her Viceroy. Then, still standing, she said:

Transcriber: Please to note my pause, my initial instruction to delete the “Nazi bastard” sentence, and my subsequent decision to retain it. Now, continuing with the journal of consultations with Dr. Gurevitch concerning the patient previously coded as three:

I have already spoken to you, Dr. Gurevitch, about my family history. But this aspect of our discussions was quite brief, as we were necessarily focused upon the patient. However, before we can understand fully all the factors at work in this countertransference, you should know that my father was not simply an officer in the German army, as I perhaps led you to believe. He was not merely a foot soldier in the Wehrmacht, not merely one of those men who fulfilled what he believed was his duty to his native land … Nein …

Wind gusted at our windows, which shuddered in their old frames. The doctor fell into her chair.

My father was a member of the Schutzstaffel, she said. An Obersturmbannführer. A true believer in the Führer and the Master Race. When he was at home, he wore his uniform at the dinner table, so proud of his collar insignia with its three diamonds, his hat with the twin lightning bolts of the SS. Hitler had just come to power. Vater made us to stand behind our chairs and shout “Heil Hitler!” before we could eat, a new form of saying grace, said our mother. Even our little brother, five years old, saluted perfectly with a stiff hand and an upraised chin.

The doctor laughed.

I was fifteen, very sheltered, still a girl. My sisters were nine and seven. We could not help but find all this saluting very funny. We shouted “Heil Hitler!” and giggled, to Vater’s rebukes, which made us only to giggle the more … Aber … But of course … it was not funny … You see: My father was instrumental in the deportation and murder of the Jews of France.

This last statement was spat out to the best of Dr. Schussler’s Germanic abilities: the F-sound start of Vater like hot steam through her teeth.

Before the invasion of France, she went on in the same mode, Vater’s job was to get money to amenable French candidates for office. Fascist rightists. Anti-Semites. Nationalists who wanted to purify la belle France. My father did his work well, evidently. By the time German tanks had poured through the Ardennes Forest, and the Wehrmacht had erased the Maginot Line, the friends of Germany were waiting for him.

But, ah! I do not suppose he had to work so very hard. The government of Léon Blum—when was that? 1935? ’36? What a trauma it must have created for the French to have been led by a Jew! What nightmares it must have engendered to have had this Jew—so Jewish-looking!—at the helm of their nation while the rest of Europe could not wait to throw their own Jews into the fire. How ready they must have been to rid themselves of this psychological stain upon l’honneur de la France.

Dr. Schussler stopped; stood.

I am sorry, Dr. Gurevitch, for this tone of cynicism, she said. But to know one’s father was at the heart of it …

The therapist remained standing, mute, as the recording machine ran on, the threading tape flapping against the take-up reel. Finally Dr. Schussler slowly sank into her chair and said:

You may recall, Dr. Gurevitch, that I had to watch the war from afar. I was in this country when Hitler invaded France, beginning my studies for the doctorate at Columbia University in New York City. There I met Helmut Schuessler—still spelled with its Germanic E to reflect our lost umlaut—Helmut, who was already an American citizen, and who would soon become my husband. And then I, too, became an American. So it happened, Doctor Gurevitch, that all at once I became a candidate for a doctorate in psychology, a wife, an American, and a registered enemy alien.

The doctor paused.

Our neighbors would not speak to us, she went on. Only our colleagues at the Analytic Institute would befriend us.

She paused.

Mostly Jews.

And paused again.

We were imprisoned as enemy aliens. Perhaps you do not know this: Many Germans were imprisoned throughout the war, not on the scale of the Japanese concentration camps, but imprisoned nonetheless. We went to … Never mind. The point is that we might have remained imprisoned for the duration of the war had not our colleagues at the Analytic Institute worked so hard to see us freed. Then we did our best to stop being Germans. We dropped the E from our names. We became the SHOE-slurs. Helmut changed his name to Harold. Can one cut off one’s inheritance so easily? Perhaps not. We never managed to lose our accents.

The doctor breathed haltingly, as one about to cry, then said:

I worried about the welfare of my family, naturlich, as would anyone whose loved ones—mother, sisters, brother, cousins, aunts—lived in a war zone. And I was anxious to hear from them. In the beginning, said the doctor, sighing and arranging herself in her chair, before the Americans entered the war, my brother and sisters sent letters in which they bragged: about Hitler, about how Germany would conquer all of Europe. And, most of all, about our father’s successes. Such praise for Vater, his life in Paris among rich, powerful men whom he now could dominate. To this very day they believe in all that claptrap; they defend him. They say, He saved us from “those anti-German elements.”

Dear Vater. He was the one who soothed the tiny consciences of the French. It did not take much, I should say, to convince that nation they should surrender their Jews. Father only had to assist in the maintenance of a little fiction. Send us only “foreign Jews,” he said, not “French Jews.” Such a small crumb to throw them: only the riffraff of Belgium or Poland, Czechoslovakia or Russia. Foreigners. Not decent French men and women such as yourselves. He helped to spread this nationalist strategy, which would come to be so useful everywhere.

And then my father asked for more Jews and more. The French resisted only briefly: They tried to shield the Jews who had lived in France for generations, the aristocrats, the “French Israelites,” as they preferred to call them. And the decorated heroes who had served France during the Great War. And the war widows. But their resistance was nothing, a tissue. As Vater knew, it was but a balm to soothe what little was left of their better natures. Soon the French sent everyone: the veterans, the war widows, the “French” Jews of old families; the bearers of l’Insigne des Blessés Militaires, la Médaille d’Honneur, la Croix de la Valeur, la Croix de Guerre, la Croix du Combattant—all those Jews with all those crosses, even grandfathers clutching les Médailles Militaires—their service to la France meant nothing. Their medals went into the flames along with them.

The threaded tape flapped on as Dr. Schussler paused.

Meanwhile, the doctor continued, what elegant dinner parties Vater attended. Parties arranged by a fool named Louis Darquier de Pellepoix—that idiot with his monocle and the ridiculous “de Pellepoix” he insisted upon appending to his name, as if he were something more than a scheming boulevardier. There Vater was, drinking champagne with Pierre Taittinger, who contributed his wealth to the cause. And with Eugène Schueller, owner of L’Oréal, another grand contributor. I can never again drink champagne, Dr. Gurevitch. I will never wear products from L’Oréal or indeed—

Forgive me … I am ranting. All I meant to say is that the family letters came, and then they came more rarely, and then not at all. Yet I knew what was happening. And here I remained as the death machine rolled on.

I am tired now. It is—what time? One? Two in the morning? I have been Christmas shopping—the packages are all around me on the floor—and I thought, while I was downtown, I might record my thoughts. I am glad I did, despite the hour. I see I must return to my own therapy if I am to do decent work for patient three. I cannot simply turn her away—as you said, Dr. Gurevitch, such a move would be experienced by her as a casting out, yet another abandonment, inducing yet more harm. So I must make conscious my own internal crosscurrents, all that churned inside me as I read the letters from München, and when they came no more, and when the war was over and everyone knew what I had known.

The doctor switched off the machine; stood; walked about the office. Then came the sounds of paper crackling, plastic bags rattling. She must be leaving, I thought, gathering her purchases, her Christmas presents, going home to Helmut or Harold or whatever his name was now, returning to her life—absolved! cleansed!—forgiven by recounting her sins to this Gurevitch, this therapist-confessor. I would follow the doctor, I thought, accost her in some way—but how? And what good would it do? If I did … the therapist would know of my existence, my precious existence as the watcher over the patient … my dear patient …

The crackling stopped. Then there was only the sound of the wind, the scrape of a match. Smoke slid under the door, the snake of smoke. The doctor went to her chair, sat down, turned on the recorder.

Dr. Gurevitch, she said in a hoarse voice, you asked if I could recall a distinct moment, or a series of moments, when I believe the deviation toward extreme countertransference began. I am embarrassed to say that I knew the answer immediately, even before you had completed your question. No, I should not say “embarrassed.” Of course not. The moment, as it had unfolded in time, had been just one of many vivid instances that occur during the course of a patient’s therapy. It was your question that brought its significance into relief.

It took place but a few months ago—how can that be? But yes, it was only last September. We had returned from the summer hiatus, and I had led the trail of talk back to the central unexamined trope of the patient’s life: I was urging her, once again, to explore the emotional effects of her adopted status. She resisted, as usual, and I pressed on. I thought I was in control of the session. I believed my motivations were clear: to help the patient see the pattern that had been imposed upon her, this endless repetition of being selected yet judged to be not exactly what was wanted, a purchase the buyer wished to return.

It was a bright day. The sun pierced the blinds, painting lines across the floor and walls. I remember this because of the way the light struck her, as you will see, because it is the light that brings the moment back to me with such clarity.

I said to the patient, Do you see? Do you see how your relationship with your girlfriend Charlotte mirrors your relationship with your mother?

She squirmed and resisted, and finally replied: Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, these can’t possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake.

At that moment she leaned forward into the light. She had been in shadow, only her body—did I mention, Dr. Gurevitch, what a very thin body she has, all sinew, so that one instinctively worries if she is well?—only her body had been illuminated, slashed by the beams through the venetian blinds. Now she leaned forward so that her eyes, too, entered the light, while the rest of her small, triangular face narrowed down into the shadows. In that moment, her eyes were nearly the hazel color she and her family persist in believing them to be. For they are actually brown, medium brown, with flecks of yellow, the flecks now catching the light so that her eyes blazed at me from the darkness. And her hair—also brown, not the fictional “dirty blond”—her hair suddenly haloed, a nimbus of frizzy light around her blazing eyes.

Every child thinks it must have been switched at birth, she said to me so fiercely from the shadows. Every child thinks these cannot possibly be my real parents, it’s all a big mistake, I do not belong to them. Well, I just happened to have more evidence than they do. Mine really are not my parents.

What envy coursed through me! Yes, Dr. Gurevitch, I see now it was envy. She was right: She could shed her family and I could not. Her attachment to them was not “real,” they were not blut, she had inherited nothing from them but experience, which can be discussed, analyzed, understood, changed. But I carried in me—what? What have I inherited from the Obersturmbannführer? A stain—which cannot be removed? For I belong to him, to them, my family: the defenders of the murderers of the Jews.

I believe it is from that moment that my determination grew to detach the patient from her adoptive parents, said the doctor. Yes, it was envy, certainly. She would enact for me what I could not do for myself. She could leave her family, find another, a kinder one, perhaps, one more suited to her. How could I know I was throwing her back into … all that.

The doctor sat quietly for a full minute, as the tape whirred and the building hummed from somewhere in its depths. Then she switched off the machine and abruptly left the room—going to the ladies’ lounge, I assumed, since she had neither put on her coat nor taken her packages.

The urge to follow and accost her was overwhelming. I could station myself in the stairwell, I thought, and as she came by—what? What would I do? I had visions of strangling her—with what? My tie? Had I come to that? Could cudgel her … with a phone…?

The phone.

I picked up the handle and dialed the number she had left in her messages for Gurevitch: five, five, two, fifteen, nineteen. At last the nine circled back to its position, at last the connection was made, finally the ringer came alive on the other side of the door. How loud it seemed, shrilling in the empty room in the dead night: five rings, six rings, seven, eight. Finally Dora Schussler’s footsteps sounded in the corridor—nine rings, ten—she ran now to catch the phone, tore into her office, picked up the receiver:

Yes, I know the hour, Helmut, she said breathlessly. I am finishing and will be on my way home now.

(So she still called him Helmut!)

I told you not to worry, she went on.

She paused.

I told you I—

She said nothing for several seconds.

Helmut? she said finally. Then: Who is this?

I only breathed into the phone, loudly, to be sure she knew that someone was there, someone who was not Helmut.

She inhaled as if to speak, then let go the breath. Attend, she murmured in French.

She put down the handle and slowly moved toward our common door.

I put my finger on the hook. I stopped breathing. It had been too loud, my breathing—too loud!

She stood inches from me—I could almost taste the tobacco on her breath. My God, how long could I stand there without breathing?

Suddenly her phone began cawing: the quick, loud shout of a line off the hook.

Sheiss, she whispered, turning away from the door and returning to her desk. Pervert, she spat, as she dropped the phone back into its cradle.





44.


What delight it gave me to taunt her! Yet how I feared that my behavior would expose me. I had to endure Dr. Schussler, I told myself; she was my only conduit to the patient; whatever her errors, whatever her deficiencies, I needed her as badly as did the patient. For the doctor had said the patient would feel “cast out.” And I … I could not contemplate what should happen to me should I lose my dear patient and all her sorrowing goodness.

I went to the office daily during Christmas week and did not encounter Dr. Schussler, which was fortunate, for I was not certain of my self-control, of what I might do should I encounter her alone, without her patients, without my patient. I might … no! Her absence was a relief; although it was with many bitter thoughts that I imagined Dora and Helmut holidaying in some Teutonic cottage in the Austrian Alps, reverting to their Germanic type amidst the sort of people who could very well forget the Obersturmbannführer who oversaw the murder of the Jews of France. My own family—what was left of it after the suicides—would have enjoyed Dr. Schussler’s company, a cultured woman with whom they could share their greasy prejudices, their ugly words dripping from their tongues like saliva from rabid dogs.

Christmas Day itself was much like Thanksgiving: the city deserted but for the lolling alcoholics and desperate Vietnam War veterans. The sale-shopping frenzies followed; then the madness of New Year’s Eve. Office workers had opened their windows to toss the pages of their desk calendars into the street, a practice I had never seen anywhere else. I walked ankle-deep through a snowfall of past appointments, random phone numbers, part numbers, names, addresses, check numbers, dollar amounts, cryptic notations. I picked one up: Give Gary the name, it said. Another: Tell Suzy no. I wondered over this Suzy—for what was she being refused? And what madness made San Franciscans dump the details of their daily lives with such abandon, such delight?

Finally came the dead day of the New Year itself, the whole world shut and sleeping—a Wednesday, but without the patient. I dared not even turn on my torn radio with its drifting tuner for fear of the dark reports that might issue therefrom; and of the static, the curtain of electronic noise that resembled too closely the whir of the hated sound machine.

I went to the office early on the following Wednesday, January 8th, hoping beyond hope that Dr. Schussler’s Christmas hiatus was for but two weeks, not the three that my own nefarious practitioners had always taken, leaving me adrift at the worst time of year. (And why do they do that? What other profession absents itself exactly at the moment its services will be most needed, when patients are confronted with the absurdly neurotic idea that family holidays should make them happy? Would a medical doctor go on leave after a plane crash?) Only silence reigned in the adjoining office, and I passed the week scouring the halls, peering into offices where real people seemed to be going about the actual acts of living.

I cannot describe the feverish excitement with which I prepared to go to the office on Wednesday, January 15th. I bathed elaborately; shaved, even my chest, determined that my presence in Room 807 should be so slight as to leave not a scintilla of odor-inducing molecules upon the air. I sat still, so still as to be nearly incorporeal. I had survived her absence without deathly consequence. Any moment she would return and release me.

And finally it happened as always: elevator, ding, footfalls, slam of the door. (Oh, how I loved her slam now, the force of her very arms!)

And how was your vacation? asked Dr. Schussler.

Oh, my God, said the patient. I can barely describe it. It was … beyond belief. I can’t thank you enough.

Ah! said the therapist. You finally swam in the sea.

That’s not quite it, said the patient.

She paused. And lowered her voice. And said:

I had the best sex I’ve ever had in my life.





45.


The story the patient went on to tell was so direct, so … specific in its descriptions, that my male member grew—I should say “sprang”—at a rate unlike any other time in my experience.

She began with the word “breasts.”

Breasts, she said. The whole evening started when I was at the bar on the hotel patio. Alone, except for a couple at the far end. And I thought, Breasts come out in hot weather.

Andie and Clarissa had long ago gone upstairs, she went on. They’d stayed with me as long as they could. But when they began tracing their fingertips up and down each other’s arms, and a flush bloomed on Clarissa’s chest, I told them: Go. I’ll be fine.

Now I was alone at the bar but for the couple, the patient said. The woman was wearing a lime-green strapless, her bosoms pouring out of the top, and she was bending over in just the right way to show them off to her man—the way you’d offer a sippy cup to a baby.

I felt my own nipples tighten, I confess, the patient said. It was all I’d hoped for: breezy nights, silk dress against my almost naked body.

She giggled after she said this to her therapist.

I hope this is all right, she said.

(Of course! I thought.)

Of course, said the therapist.

Then, just as I was enjoying it, she went on, I saw the expression on the man’s face—his jaw was just askew, his eyes slanting down, not listening as the woman talked—and Charlotte’s ugly voice jumped into my head.

Leering jerk! Charlotte said.

I’m leering, too! I shot back at her in my mind. It was the old argument. The woman wants to show her breasts, I said. They’re sexual organs. And men are supposed to want to see them.

Leering jerks!

I had to shut her out of my head, the patient told the doctor. She somehow wanted to take all the weirdness out of sex. She couldn’t accept the part of it that was wild: where sex is animal.

The patient sighed.

Earlier in the evening, she continued, the bar had been filled to the edge of the pool. Men in expensive business suits, a few exquisitely dressed women. They were packed in so tightly that the circulating waiters were invisible, and the trays of champagne glasses seemed to float above the crowd on their own. Overnight markets, I heard. Inflation hedges. Interest-rate arbitrage. British accents, German, Spanish, French. Then I remembered the sign in the lobby: an international economics conference.

They were all around me, sweeping in all at once from some forum just ending. I was almost overcome by the scents of aftershave and powder in the tropical heat. Their hands were flying in the exchange of ideas. Their faces were flashing like lightning bugs. I can’t tell you how jealous I was. I thought: These are the sort of people I belong with.

Then there was Charlotte’s nasty voice again: Pigs!

And I asked myself: Were they pigs?

And then this probably ugly thought came to me: the new Jews.

I tried to stamp it out, but you can’t take back a thought. And the idea finished itself in my mind despite my attempt to stop it: There was a time when only Jews did my sort of work—protected the treasures of kings and pashas and sheiks. When only Jews minded the fruits of taxes, allegiances, tributes, raids, robberies, wars, sieges, rapes, murders. And I suddenly saw myself in the long history of money: successor to the millennia of Hebrews who had handled filthy lucre to keep “clean” the consciences of pashas and popes.

The patient laughed.

So maybe it’s right that I’m a Jew. Maybe I’ve been training to be a Jew my whole life.

It got late, she went on. The couple at the end of the bar left. The wind picked up. Dead palm fronds scraped the paving stones. I intended to drink, lose myself in a few martinis, like Mother. Why not? There is some glamour, some easing of life, that can come from sitting at a good bar with a well-made drink. The martini, for instance. The bartender made it just as I’d been trained to do: a little ice slick, clear and light, resting on the surface in a dead man’s float.

But then the barman stretched and yawned. Yawned. And any hope of glamour vanished into the maw of that yawn. Now I could see there was only the empty patio, a man behind the bar wanting to go home, another man sweeping, a maid shining the leaves of a rubber plant. At the reception desk across the patio: a single person, a man, his head on his chin.

The patient settled her bill and walked down to the sea, first along a lighted path, then through a phony “jungle,” then past a phony “lagoon,” and finally came to the real sand.

The beach was empty; there was no moon. She removed her shift and stood still, wearing only her underpants. The breeze was colder than she’d expected. Goosebumps came up on her arms. Her nipples hardened. She took her breasts in her hands and softly kneaded them, for the warmth, she told herself. But then for the pleasure. Without moonlight, the sand was barely paler than the sea, which was at low tide, drained, unable to lift itself to lap at the shore. She walked out thirty paces before the water got to her knees. She wouldn’t get to a good swimming depth until she’d walked a hundred yards out to sea.

Then she remembered what Dr. Schussler had told her. Be careful with yourself, the doctor had said. And she turned back.

The pool was lit with soft green underwater lights, the patient noticed as she walked back to her room. She wasn’t ready to sleep, she realized as soon as she had closed the door behind her. She put on a bathing suit, then went back to the pool, where she found a low diving board. She performed a swan dive, then surfaced and tried to sprint in the too-warm water. But the pool’s curving walls made any serious swimming impossible, and she was aware, anyhow, that her aggressive splashes echoed too loudly against the hotel facade in the quiet night.

She stretched out on the surface, trying to be as light and clear as the wisp of ice on her last martini, to be nothing, a slick held up by water.

When suddenly something skimmed the underside of her body, like a large fish—

She jumped upright.

Laughter came from the dark side of the pool. Then a woman’s voice saying, I’m sorry. It is only that I cannot sleep.

The patient paddled toward the voice, which had spoken with a soft accent the patient couldn’t identify. In the shadows was a woman holding the edge of the pool, the ends of her hair floating on the surface.

The woman turned her head. She had large eyes. Bold-stroke brows. A wide, dramatic, high-bridged nose. Full lips, like the wax lips children put on their mouths.

Then she turned her body. And there were her breasts. Bare.

Easy, the patient told herself. Europeans go nude all the time.

The woman made no effort to cover her breasts, only crossed her left arm beneath them, which had the effect of raising the nipples so that they played hide-and-seek, hide-and-seek, with the lapping surface of the pool.

My name is Dorotea, said the woman, who seemed to be in her mid-thirties. They exchanged pleasantries, how long they’d been here, how they liked it, where they were from.

Argentina, Dorotea said. Nice to meet you, she went on, laughing and extending her hand under the water.

The woman was so striking that the patient could not stop gazing at her. She seemed to have been painted by Picasso during his cubist phase, with all the planes of her face broken into sharp angles, each eye so powerful that it needed a separate space, four planes for her nose, six for each high cheekbone. But the mouth, the mouth: blooming dark red amid the hard angles. The patient finally took the offered hand. She said a bit more about herself. She tried not to look at the breasts Dorotea was cradling, not at the dark-pink aureoles as they tightened in the cool night air, not at the nipples, pebbled, erect.

Dorotea held on to her hand.

I saw you earlier, Dorotea said. I was with the group—

The economics conference?

Yes. And I saw you …

I was at the bar, said the patient.

Earlier, said Dorotea. With your friends. There was a long pause. She was still holding the patient’s hand. Then she said: Your friends. They are … together?

Is this happening? thought the patient.

Yes, she said. Together.

Dorotea released the patient’s hand, then slowly, and with some sense of demonstration, let go of her breasts. And you? she asked.

Now the patient allowed herself to look down at the full forms hiding like slick fish beneath the surface of the water, ready for the net.

I’m alone, the patient said.

Dorotea took a step closer.

They stood facing each other, saying nothing as water lapped at the rim of the pool.

Then a hand was tracing the patient’s hip.

Okay? asked the woman.

The patient gasped.

Under the water, Dorotea’s fingers were wandering to her waist, her belly. Slowly they circled the rim of the pelvic bone, down the thigh, across the gap between the legs, then back up again. The patient felt her *oris grow, flourish, in the center of this circle, being the object of this circling, some kind of shrine the fingers had to walk around seven times, eight, nine, but could not enter. Finally one fingertip stopped on her pelvic bone, a spot just above the *oris: the crown of the *oris.

Oh! exclaimed the patient. She felt her *oris must be inches high. If she got out of the water, everyone would see it, a finger poking out of her suit. She could barely focus on Dorotea’s face, which showed something triumphant. What was the patient supposed to do? She had never done anything like this before. Something in her said, Don’t do this. Be careful. Who is this woman? What are we doing here, outside, in public, in this pool? But then that fingertip slipped a little lower. And she had no more thoughts.

Meanwhile Dorotea’s free hand went to the patient’s breast, which was smashed under the spandex of the tank suit.

It comes off like this, the patient said to her new friend, undoing the clip at the back. When the water licked at her nipples, the patient’s legs went weak, and she could do nothing for a moment. Then she roused herself and reached for the breasts that had lured her here. Her companion rewarded her touch with a long, low moan.

Dorotea’s exquisite finger began massaging the skin below the crown bone, the skin that was connected to … everything. The patient fell against the wall of the pool.

Is this all right? she asked. I mean, what if someone sees?

What will they see? said Dorotea. As long as we don’t kiss.

They let their nipples touch, part and touch under the water; nothing else, only the nipples.

I can’t stand this anymore, said the patient. I’m going to faint.

Come to my room, Dorotea said.





46.


Oh, God! said the patient to her therapist. I’m sorry. Maybe this is too graphic?

(Not at all! I thought, to my disgrace.)

Of course not, dear, said the therapist. But I would only care to know—

(what happened next!)

—why you wish to tell me this. Why do you think it is important that I know you in this way?

The patient hummed; then was silent.

(In the quiet of this pause, I struggled to contain my excitement. The problem was not merely my tumescence, the possibility of a consequent need for repositioning, the sounds I might make. The problem was … oh, God … my shame. The person who had had the sexual encounter—please God, let me not demean her!—was my dear patient, whom I had come to love as a daughter.)

Said the patient at last: I think you will see what it means, if you let me go on.

Why, of course, said the doctor. It is not a question of “let.” Please go on as you will.

(I prayed again to God: Help me, remember she is the patient, my beloved patient, not like the others, nothing like them at all!)





47.


Dorotea’s room was enormous, said the patient. A living room. Kitchen. Dining table with four armchairs.

How did you rate this? I asked her.

She turned, put her hand on the nape of my neck. Darling, she said with a laugh. I was just promoted to managing director. It was a horrible crawl. So let us not discuss this now. Except to say I at least get a suite.

I’m also … I am a “quant,” an econometrics analyst, I said.

So we are …

Together, I answered.

She laughed and touched my cheek. Instantly I knew I’d met a person of substance, said the patient. Her direct gaze. The forthrightness of her sex play in the pool—I knew it must have come from somewhere. Someone confident, substantial, accomplished.

And the obstacles you had to overcome, I said to her. As a woman.

The bedroom is here, said Dorotea.

There was an enormous bed. A patio, its door open, sheer curtains floating up like they were breathing.

Yes, said Dorotea, as she stroked my face. As a woman, she said.

We turned, gazed at each other, inches apart. I said to her: Kissing is very important to me.

Now why would I say that? the patient asked Dr. Schussler. In the middle of … Why would it matter to talk about kissing?

As you said, replied the doctor. She was someone of substance, you sensed. As are you. Two women of substance. About to have sex.

There was a pause. Yes, said the patient. Yes. I suppose you’re right. I suppose that’s why I said to her:

Kissing is very important to me.

She replied by exploring my cheeks with her her lips—God! what succulent lips!—all around my mouth.

Sshh, Dorotea whispered. No more talking.

Our kiss was soft, exploratory. We pulled back, delayed; then kissed again, this time much more … urgently.

I don’t remember how this happened, said the patient, but at some point I tore off her robe, she tore down my bathing suit. Then we roamed our hands all over.

The patient looked again at Dorotea’s breasts, then at the rise of her belly, the dark ruff that hid between the swelling bell of her thighs. Now she could feel it: the soft density of her skin, the curve of her hip, the womanly weight of her backside, a soft layer over a hard-muscled core.

Suddenly Dorotea fell to her knees. (A posture of subservience! yelled Charlotte in the patient’s head. Women should not do this!) The patient’s bathing suit was still around one ankle when Dorotea took her ass in both hands (Shut up, Charlotte!), pulled her hips toward her, then drove the patient’s *oris through those wax-red lips.

Oh, God! the patient moaned.

She had no choice but to yield to Dorotea’s plans, to the hands at her ass that were driving her forward, to those lips over her inner lips, the tongue that circled and licked and flicked. Dorotea pulled the patient’s hips forward, then pushed slightly back, forward and back, then around, and around again, so that the patient was performing a sort of belly dance, the performance all for the sake of Dorotea’s mouth.

Then suddenly the dance stopped.

Dorotea let go of her. The patient was so aroused, confused. She looked down.

But Dorotea did nothing, only sat there, five seconds, ten. Then she reached forward and gently spread the outer lips: The *oris was now naked, exposed. It seemed to have grown, in sensation, to enormous size. The slight breeze teasing the surface was almost more than the patient could bear. Her legs trembled. Then Dorotea slowly licked the inner lips, around and around, and finally, slowly, circled the *oris again.

Oh, my God! said the patient. I can’t stand it!

Dorotea took the *oris back into her mouth, sucked it, flicked her tongue at it, fast, faster, a furious ululation: lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo …

The patient felt her insides contract. Tighter.

Tighter.

Until the muscles could hold no more.

And a wave of contractions moved through her; her entire pelvis: vibrating in time with Dorotea’s tongue.

Lo-lo-lo-lo-lo …

Finally, she was too sensitive—on the verge of pain. The patient cried out: Stop! Oh, stop! Don’t touch me anymore!

Dorotea stopped, but held on to her, both hands on her ass. And when the patient became still, Dorotea placed her tongue gently on the patient’s *oris. Oh! the patient called out, as another wave of contractions began. Then another pause, another gentle touch of the tongue—Oh, God! She was still coming—pause, touch, pause, touch, contractions slowing each time, down and down to a single last one: Dorotea licking all the orgasms out of her.

She tumbled onto the bed.

And now you, said the patient after a few moments, reaching out for Dorotea.

Are you mad? said her friend. Enjoy. Rest. Recover. There is plenty of time. All night. Why don’t we shower, see what will happen then?

I nearly cried, the patient told Dr. Schussler. This was all I’d ever imagined in being with a woman. But all those years of obeying … what? Some proper way women were supposed to have sex. My turn, your turn. You haven’t even enjoyed your orgasm for a minute when it’s time to turn around and take care of her, pretend you’re still hot, excited, when all you feel is a longing to … enjoy, rest, see what will happen later.

The patient paused. A sob escaped her.

This means so much to you, said Dr. Schussler gently.

Oh, God. Yes.

She paused.

I was beginning to think I was not really a lesbian, since I didn’t really enjoy the sex. And now …

She sat quietly for some seconds then said:

We showered, played with the soap, emerged from the bathroom still half-wet and trembling. I made love to Dorotea as best I could, but I felt my lovemaking was crude compared to hers, inept, inexpert. The women I’d been with were like adolescents compared to her, still learning how to love. And here was this full-grown woman, free, open to receiving whatever I could give her. At that moment, I think I understood what a teenage boy must feel the first time he has sex with a real woman: a trembling, fumbling excitement.

We slept and then made love again, and again. Hands, mouths, positions, we tried all we could think of until we were exhausted. Finally we fell back on the bed, shouting: “No more! Don’t touch me! I can’t take any more!”

Hours later, Dorotea woke up, told me to sleep, she had to pack. She was leaving on a morning flight. She kissed me, left me her card, with a sexy note on the back.

You must have been disappointed, said the therapist.

By the note?

No, said the therapist. By her leaving.

There was a pause.

No, said the patient. I already knew she’d be leaving. Somewhere in the night we’d discussed it. We’d agreed we would see each other the next time Dorotea would be in San Francisco, which may or may not happen. I know how these things are. But the note … I was fine.

What was in the note? asked the therapist.

There was a pause.

Oh, said the patient. I don’t think I can say.

She paused again.

(In the silence, I struggled to keep myself from imagining what else the patient and Dorotea could do with their mouths, their hands, what positions and actions could be more than the patient could say.)

All right, said the therapist. I do not want to embarrass you.

The patient laughed.

This may not make sense to you, she said, but after I read the note, I fell back and touched the sheets, with all the evidence of our lovemaking, and right then—then—I decided I had to find my birth mother. Don’t you think that’s strange? the patient asked Dr. Schussler.

There was a long pause.

(I wanted to shout: Yes. It is strange. Do not do it! Only grief will come of it! Dr. Schussler is not up to the job of guiding you!)

I do not think it is strange at all, the doctor finally said.

(Damn you!)

I think you had found something you always hoped would exist, said the therapist. The sort of sex you imagined, wanted, then found. And with a woman like yourself: accomplished, in business, feminine, with no boundaries to her sexuality and lovemaking. So I would think it is not strange that you would take the leap to another longed-for hope.

A real mother, said the patient.

No, said the therapist. Your adoptive mother is real enough. What I meant was, to belong somewhere, to feel you belong, to someone you want, who also wants you.





48.


She did not want you! I wanted to scream. Your birth mother did not want you! If she had wanted you, you would be with her today!

What was Dr. Schussler thinking? She was leading the patient to disaster! The doctor’s family story had compromised her; she should have recused herself, no matter the temporary setback for the patient. In a few months, a new, better analyst would take the patient across this bridge; would guide her away from this dangerous search for “blood.” Or, if the patient shunned therapy—a superior option!—she would find a new lover, someone like the stunning Dorotea, whose lovemaking would be so overwhelming, so physical and delightful, so “animal” (as she had put it), that the patient could not possibly see it as a metaphor for her perfect, lost mother. Given such sex, “mother” would be the last word that would come to mind!

But now … the die was cast, was set in stone … all the expressions of regretful permanence whispered themselves in my ear. In the weeks that followed, I was forced to listen as the patient imagined the path to her birth mother, wondered over its possibility, the method of finding her, who might have the records, and who, having the information, would indeed reveal it.

I trembled at her determination. But then, to my relief, I saw that the patient’s research skills were undeveloped. This brilliant woman who could tease meaning from masses of financial data: utterly at sea in the face of archives. Oh, these poor latter-day graduates who have never read Greek or Latin; who look up dumbly if you mention a Latin root in English; who read the corrections in the margins of their papers but still cannot fathom the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs—never mind their total ignorance of the delicious subtleties awaiting them in the subjunctive mood! With such a poverty of language, how can they reap the riches of the library? One surely must pity these deprived Masters of Business Administration, sent out into the world without an understanding of card catalogues.

The patient’s first effort was sorrowfully naïve: a call to the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. Please could someone tell me who can answer my questions about adoptions of baptized Jewish children after the war?—as if they would possibly reveal their nefarious plan, if indeed anyone there even knew about the plot. Did she think someone would contact her to say, Yes, dear, we have a list right here of the Jewish children stolen from their parents? She called four times, on each occasion being directed elsewhere. She wrote several letters. There were no replies but one: “I am not certain where you heard about such events,” said the letter writer, one Father Joseph, “but they have no basis in fact.”

This written denial led her to question the story her mother had told her, which in turn led to several anguished sessions during which she related painful phone conversations, her mother at first helpful, reiterating details she had previously relayed, adding only inconsequential elaborations: the color of her father’s suit on the day her mother had uncovered the file, an elaborate seal on the birth document with the letters H.S. But then a cold curtain fell. “Mother” reverted to the woman who, confronted with the unpleasant topic of her daughter’s homosexuality, had slammed down her teacup to say, We will not discuss this! We will say nothing more about the adoption. I have told you all I know. And I expect you will not put this matter before me again!

Oddly, the patient obeyed. She stopped calling her mother for information. Odder still, she complied with her mother’s demand that “You will not tell Father!” She wrote letters to every Catholic adoption agency still extant in the Chicago area but did not call her mother and father to learn more about her origins. It was as if she had severed her emotional connection with her adoptive parents. My poor patient! She was cut adrift. Her parents were no longer her parents; her girlfriend Charlotte was gone (along with all her Holly Near posters, said the patient); she worked ten hours a day, went home, slept a little, and repeated the schedule. Weekends for a while were filled with compulsively scheduled dinners and movies; then, as the patient wearied of her plan-making, she had little but an empty apartment and lonely hours.

I maintained only one hope for the patient: that she would abandon the idea of finding her “birth mother.” How I wished she could see herself as made from whole cloth—as the self-created creature I’d hoped to follow into my own release from ancestry. This she might have achieved if that damned Dora Schussler were better at her job. But the therapist did not have the skills to bring the patient across to the other shore. Her patient was therefore caught in a downstream current, flowing relentlessly toward one goal—finding her “true” mother—and its corollary: the possibility of being loved by her. I believed this goal to be a disastrous one, as I have said; I thought it would merely bring the patient under the tyranny of another set of parental needs and desires—tie her through the horrible, placental prerogatives of blood.

The sessions wore themselves away. February rains battered us; March was moody, humid for San Francisco, seeping into our seams until life itself seemed bloated and gray.

Then a literal hood was drawn over us. The OPEC oil crisis had panicked the nation. Ostensibly to save fuel, President Ford had ordered that daylight savings time should begin two months early. And so we moved our clocks ahead while still in winter light. All of us on the N Judah at 7:30 in the morning found ourselves in the lingering dark, our bodies and senses telling us everything was wrong, the light was wrong, the very earth itself was out of kilter, the axis not yet tilting toward spring. We might try to convince ourselves that life was getting better—last year, under the now banished President Nixon, we were forced into daylight savings in January. But the wrongness of the sky prevailed over everyone’s mood. To live under this pall of darkness made us all feel impoverished: beggars shivering in the black morning, paupers in the cold dark.

Meanwhile I listened to the patient’s sessions in a growing state of terror—yes, terror overtook me. She was alone, vulnerable, unloved. She had licked clean the happiness of her one night with Dorotea (so to speak). And her path to her “birth mother” seemed hopelessly closed.

So of course they came, the crows, fluttering at our windows in the last of the rains; banging at the glass with the forces of the wind; rattling our tender doors—depression’s ministers, sucking away the ancient cool core of the building. This time, however, they came not for me but for my dear patient.

She must abandon this fruitless search for her mother! I thought. There was no other way to drive out the creatures! But she did not, could not. She went on contacting this agency and that, to no avail. The pecked-out days went on, week after week. The Furies kept chattering through the voices of our trembling doors, through the rattling of our windows.

And finally I could bear no longer the patient’s suffering. I could not stand this death-in-life. She was to be my icon, my champion. And the more mired she became in the muck into which Dr. Schussler had shucked her, the more determined I became to save her. She would not abandon her search; the doctor could not guide her. Now only I could help.

I could not let the monsters get her! I would not let them in! I was a professor; I had research skills. I reasoned that I could learn much more than could my dear patient, even given the sparse nature of our clues.

Therefore my project was launched. There was no choice, I thought; I could not just sit and listen. I had to abet the search for the birth mother.

My new hope was to find her dead.